The news report said that drugs and a number of weapons including grenades were seized during a police raid on an alleged safe house in the Sydney suburb of Glenfield.
(All gang related stuff—organised crime now seems to think of Sydney as ‘home’!)
But that report got me thinking about this word ‘grenade.’
We know what it means (we’ve been watching war movies since we were kids)—but where did this word come from?
Why are small, hand-thrown, explosive devices called ‘grenades’?
When I started my research the first thing I discovered is just how old this word (and this kind of device) is.
The earliest recorded mention of the word ‘grenade’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1591.
But why are these nasty little things called ‘grenades’?
It seems to come from a word (or a group of related words) found in French, Spanish, and Portuguese meaning ‘pomegranate.’
And when you think about it, these small, hand-held explosives are (very roughly) the size and shape of a pomegranate fruit.
Apparently the Chinese first had the idea of gunpowder filled ceramic bowls that could be ignited and thrown by soldiers more than a thousand years ago.
The idea seems to have caught on in Europe by the 1400s—although how common they were is unclear.
By the mid-17th century, infantry known as ‘grenadiers’ began to emerge in the armies of Europe, who specialized in shock and close quarters combat, mostly with the usage of grenades.
(It had never occurred to me that the famous Grenadier Guards were originally named after the hand grenades they were trained to throw.)
And the ‘Mills Bomb’ (the first modern fragmentation grenade) was used in the trenches by 1915 in the First World War.
Personally, I’m not fond of pomegranates—all those seeds! —but even worse are those nasty little grenades found in a Sydney house (all that shrapnel!)
This week's edition of The Spectator Australia is in newsagents now -- with a cartoon of Angela Merkel on the front cover, and my 'Language' column in the back.
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